Tiny house off-grid energy calculator
I often get the question during self-sufficient off-grid training courses: how many solar panels would I like to install? And how many solar collectors? And if I do want to use a wood-burning stove, how much wood? And how much energy does a shower or cooking a meal cost?
In class Self-sufficient Off-grid In terms of energy, basic knowledge about solar boilers, solar panels, comparing insulation material, explanation about energy guzzlers in the house, and more is discussed. You will receive sufficient starting points to start building after the course or to instruct your builder. With this tiny house energy calculator you can find even more answers to these kinds of questions, but beware: this will unfortunately become a very technical story.
First of all, you need a lot of data. In addition to the dimensions, you also need the insulation value of your insulation material, how much shower water you use, and much more. If you know that, you can use the energy calculator below to get a rough picture of external sources. You can learn a lot by tweaking values.
Instructive
The course deals with this tiny house energy calculator directly, but you can learn a lot from it. I therefore invite you to change values and see what happens in the graph. You can start by clicking on the rectangular blocks in the graph at the top - that's how you draw a line. Now you can turn them back on one by one.
The number shown at "January heatgap" is a nice indicator of what you will need in external energy in the coldest winter month. Here's how to see what happens to this "January heatgap":
- if the tiny house is not 8 but 4 meters long?
- if the tiny house is not 3 but 2 meters high?
- if you replace all ecological insulation with chemical ones?
- if you do not use 5 but 50 cm of insulation?
- if you do not use 15 but 20 cm of insulation?
- if you change the insulation thickness extremely for the roof or for the walls?
- omit all windows?
- Do not use double glazing but use single glazing or even better glass?
- not ventilate?
- how efficient per m2 are the newest solar panels compared to a solar boiler?
- How many solar panels (green line in the right graph) do you need (off-grid) to get by for cooking and other things (blue line "Cooking+Other") in February?
- What if you shower for 15 minutes instead of 7?
- How many m3 of wood do you need if you only burn wood?
Scroll down for the off-grid energy calculator. Have fun with it!
Check out our popular course Selfsufficient Off-grid.
